How to Write a Fight Scene
When you’re a thriller write, chances are pretty good you’ll eventually have to write a fight scene. When that happens, you’ll need to ask yourself a few questions:
Is this my character’s first fight? Second? Ninetieth?
How does my character feel about his/her opponent? How does that assessment of his/her foe affect his/her strategy for the fight?
Is my character a trained fighter? If so, what kind of training?
Photo credit Erric, Deviant Art.
Personally, I love a good fight scene, as a reader and as a writer. They’re a ton of fun if they’re done well, and informative to boot. After all, how many of us get into fights regularly enough to know good street fighting strategy?
When I was coming up with Bai Hsu, the main character of my Bai Hsu series, I had a really important decision to make: I knew I wanted him to be a skilled martial artist, but which martial art? Believe me, it is in no way sufficient to just say someone has a black belt and then leave it at that. A person with a black belt in Aikido is going to handle an attack a LOT differently than a person with a black belt in Krav Maga. You can’t write a fight scene unless you narrow the parameters a bit.
To do this, Wes and I watched a lot of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fights. We assessed Bai’s physical strengths and ran those against his personality type and decided he held a third degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do and had picked up Krav Maga and Muay Thai after joining the CIA. This means I get to have a lot of fun with fight scenes.
Typically what I’ll do is I’ll get the bones of the scene down and figure out three things:
What is the eventual goal of this fight scene? (Meaning, is Bai fighting for his life, or is he trying to disable someone? Is he responding to a threat, or is he making a point?)
What are Bai’s limitations? (How is feeling physically? Is he armed? Is the other person armed? etc.)
What is the other fighter’s skill level? Is Bai fighting a marshmallow who’ll go down in two moves or is he squaring off against someone with real training? (It’s always trickier to, but more fun, to write fight scenes with skilled opponents because then I get to figure out the blocking twice!)
Bai is very smart and he’s a strategic fighter, so he’s constantly thinking about these three things whenever he faces off against someone. After I answer those questions, I watch tutorial videos and MMA bouts until I have a general idea of what sequence of moves I think will take place, and then Wes and I will work out the blocking for the fight in our family room. It’s hilarious fun, we look like two lumbering, oafish brawlers.
After all that is finally done, I write down the scene all bare-bones like and then rewrite it and polish it until it matches the rest of the manuscript. It’s a ton of work, but it’s one of the most enjoyable parts of my job. If Bai were here, he’d tell you it’s one of the best parts of his job, too! Good luck!
